Thursday, June 01, 2006

How to defeat the complexity of joint action (or prevent it from defeating you)

In my May 31 post, I talked about the formidable challenges of joint action and decision-making. Joint initiatives are becoming more common, because of the flattening and widening of bureaucratic structures.

While hugely preferable to rigid hierarchy and the accumulation of authority in fewer hands, joint initiatives introduce a number of inter- and intra-organizational factors that can gum up the works before the initiative even gets off the ground.

What are these factors? They fall into two major categories, which have to do with prevailing realities in each of the collaborating organizations. The first of these is a matter of organizational design. Organizations are made up of people and a collection of features—architecture or structure, routines or standard operating procedures (SOPs), and culture. This gives rise to the acronym PARC: People, Architecture, Routines, Culture.

Organizations exist to accomplish things that individuals working independently cannot accomplish. Once the organization is launched, its mission often metamorphoses into something quite different from what the ostensible masters of the organization have in mind. This has to do with varying interpretations of the mission on the part of those who own the organization (in the public-sector, the “owners” are those with institutional or statutory oversight) and those who run it.

Those who run the organization confront an array of operational problems. They develop SOPs, often through trial and error, to deal with these problems. The mission then becomes what is achievable through existing SOPs. Hence PARC—and the bewilderment of outsiders who experience bureaucratic processes, rules, and procedures that appear convoluted and silly. “Organizations do not make sense,” says consultant Geoffrey Bellman. But to at least some of those who carry out the SOPs, the routines make perfect sense.

The second major factor has to do with office politics. Joint decision-making involves bargaining on the part of players within and between collaborating organizations. Bargaining means navigating through inter- and intra-organizational rivalries—former Pentagon insider Perry Smith identifies eight distinct types of these—in an effort to determine a mutually acceptable course of action.

As you can see, the range of variables is mind-boggling. You could spend a lot of time just listing them. Therefore, to launch a successful joint initiative, you have to work out the kinks in order to develop the operational coherence to fulfill the initiative’s mission.